What placed postmodernism more in the service of the corporation than of society at large was that it was client facing, not user facing: it established cultural conditions in which a corporate officer could choose to believe they were, Medici-like, acquiring a work of art with all its useful cultural connotations of wealth and taste, but without encountering the structural tensions between architectural avant-gardes and establishment patrons that were a risky feature of mid-twentieth-century patronage. Because they were designed for appearances from distances, the buildings of postmodernism were generally not places for a public, for a deep and inhabitable threshold between interior and exterior; they were not places that would require a literal and perhaps figurative negotiation between public good and private interest. The facade was now a pictorial membrane, to be looked at but never freely crossed.